1.2.5 Back to Time
I learned, however, that working on Ibn al-Arabi’s books is never a waste of time. One of the reasons for the lack of any serious studies of Ibn al-Arabi’s unique view of time and creation is the difficult symbolic language he usually used, in addition to the fact that he didn’t discuss this subject at length in any single place in his extant works, so we must piece together his overall cosmological understanding of time from his scattered treatments. Even after serious study, it is never possible to anticipate in advance when or whether the puzzles will ever be solved. There is always a great deal of probability when working with subjects related to mysticism, as if it is covered by the same laws of quantum mechanics. No wonder, because it is resolved in or by the heart!
It then came to path that, as I was working on these various issues related to the Meccan Revelations and other books, I came across a quote attributed to Ibn al-Arabi: “Time is liquid space, and space is rigid time.” Although I had already noticed the two levels of time and how they are intertwined and connected in various complex ways, as explained in chapter IV of the Single Monad Model, but it never occurred to me how to convert this fundamental key insight into a mathematical model, which turned out to be extremely simple, with the help of complex hyperbolic geometry that can avoid Riemannian manifolds, which lead to all the complicated curved four dimensional space-time, full of singularities at ill-defined geometrical points.